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"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

A simple majority in either chamber would be sufficient to change the present system of CIA oversight. As much as the agency wants to keep its activities secret, it would have little choice but to comply with serious congressional demands for more information and more supervision. The power of the purse gives the legislative branch the means to enforce its will on a reluctant CIA, and even one house standing alone could use this power as a control mechanism. That is, assuming that Congress is willing to accept the responsibility.

CIA and the Press

In a recent interview, a nationally syndicated columnist with close ties to the CIA was asked how he would have reacted in 1961 if he had uncovered advance information that the agency was going to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. He replied somewhat wistfully, "The trouble with the establishment is that I would have gone to one of my friends in the government, and he would have told me why I shouldn't write the story. And I probably wouldn't have written the story."

It was rather fitting that this columnist, when queried about exposing a CIA operation, should have put his answer in terms of the "establishment" (of which he is a recognized member), since much of what the American people have learned-or have not learned-about the agency has been filtered through an "old-boy network" of journalists friendly to the CIA. There have been exceptions, but, by and large, the CIA has attempted to discourage, alter, and even suppress independent investigative inquiries into agency activities.

The CIA's principal technique for fending off the press has been to wrap itself in the mantle of "national security." Reporters have been extremely reluctant to write anything that might endanger an ongoing operation or, in Tom Wicker's words, "get an agent killed in Timbuktu." The CIA has, for its part, played upon these completely understandable fears and used them as a club to convince newsmen that certain stories should never be written. And many reporters do not even have to be convinced, either because they already believe that the CIA's activities are not the kind of news that the public has a right to know or because in a particular case they approve of the agency's aims and methods.

For example, on September 23, 1970, syndicated columnist Charles Bartlett was handed, by a Washington-based official of ITT, an internal ITT report sent in by the company's two representatives in Chile, Hal Hendrix and Robert Berrellez. This eight-page document-marked PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL -- said that the American ambassador to Chile had received the "green light to move in the name of President Nixon ... [with] maximum authority to do all possible-short of a Dominican Republic-type action-to keep Allende from taking power." It stated that the Chilean army "has been assured full material and financial assistance by the U.S. military establishment" and that ITT had "pledged [its financial] support if needed" to the anti-Allende forces. The document also included a lengthy rundown of the political situation in Chile.

With the material for an expose in his hands, Bartlett did not launch an immediate investigation. Instead, he did exactly what ITT hoped he would do: he wrote a column about the dangers of a "classic Communist-style assumption of power" in Chile. He did see some hope that "Chile will find a way to avert the inauguration of Salvador Allende," but thought there was little the United States could "profitably do" and that "Chilean politics should be left to the Chileans." He did not inform his readers that he had documentary evidence indicating that Chilean politics were being left to the CIA and ITT.

Asked why he did not write more, Bartlett replied in a 1973 telephone interview, "I was only interested in the political analysis. I didn't take seriously the Washington stuff-the description of machinations within the U.S. government. [The ITT men who wrote the report] had not been in Washington; they had been in Chile." Yet, by Bartlett's own admission, his September 28 column was based on the lIT report-in places, to the point of paraphrase. He wrote about several incidents occurring in Chile that he could not possibly have verified in Washington. Most reporters will not use material of this sort unless they can check it out with an independent source, so Bartlett was showing extraordinary faith in the reliability of his informants. But he used their material selectively -to write an anti-Allende scare piece, not to blow the whistle on the CIA and ITT.

An ITT official gave the same report to Time's Pentagon correspondent, John Mulliken. Mulliken covered neither the CIA nor Chile as part of his regular beat, and he sent the ITT document to Time's headquarters in New York for possible action. As far as he knows, Time never followed up on the story. He attributes this to "bureaucratic stupidity-the system, not the people." He explains that Time had shortly before done a long article on Chile, and New York "didn't want to do any more."

Thus, the public did not learn what the U.S. government and ITT were up to in Chile until the spring of 1972, when columnist Jack Anderson published scores of ITT internal documents concerning Chile. Included in the Anderson papers, as one of the most important exhibits, was the very same document that had been given eighteen months earlier to Bartlett and Time magazine.

Jack Anderson is very much a maverick among Washington journalists, and he will write about nearly anything he learns-and can confirm-about the U.S. government and the CIA. With a few other notable exceptions, however, the great majority of the American press corps has tended to stay away from topics concerning the agency's operations. One of the reasons for this is that the CIA, being an extremely secretive organization, is a very hard beat to cover. Newsmen are denied access to its heavily guarded buildings, except in tightly controlled circumstances. No media outlet in the country has ever assigned a full-time correspondent to the agency, and very few report on its activities even on a part-time basis. Except in cases where the CIA wants to leak some information, almost all CIA personnel avoid any contact whatsoever with journalists. In fact, agency policy decrees that employees must inform their superiors immediately of any and all conversations with reporters, and the ordinary operator who has too many of these conversations tends to become suspect in the eyes of his co-workers.

For the general view in the CIA (as in some other parts of the federal government) is that the press is potentially an enemy force -albeit one that can be used with great success to serve the agency's purposes. Former Deputy Director for Intelligence Robert Amory was speaking for most of his colleagues when in a February 26, 1967, television interview he said that press disclosures of agency funding of the National Student Association and other private groups were "a commentary on the immaturity of our society." With the pronounced Anglophile bias and envy of Britain's Official Secrets Act so common among high CIA officials, he compared the situation to our "free motherland in England," where if a similar situation comes up, "everybody shushes up in the interest of their national security and . . . what they think is the interest of the free world civilization."

Former CIA official William J. Barnds* was even more critical of journalistic probes of the agency in a January 1969 article in the influential quarterly Foreign Affairs:

The disclosure of intelligence activities in the press in recent years is a clear national liability. These disclosures have created a public awareness that the U.S. government has, at least at times, resorted to covert operations in inappropriate situations, failed to maintain secrecy and failed to review ongoing operations adequately. The public revelations of those weaknesses, even though they are now partially corrected, hampers CIA (and the U.S. government) by limiting those willing to cooperate with it and its activities. As long as such disclosures remain in the public mind, any official effort to improve CIA's image is as likely to backfire as to succeed.

Barnd's admission that the CIA has certain weaknesses is unusual coming from a former (or present) agency official, but very few in the CIA would disagree with his statement that press stories about intelligence operations are a "national liability."

The CIA's concern about how to deal with reporters and how to use the press to best advantage dates back to the agency's beginnings. During the 1950s the agency was extremely wary of any formal relations with the media, and the standard answer to press inquiries was that the CIA "does not confirm or deny published reports."

To be sure, there was a CIA press office, but it was not a very important part of the agency's organization. To CIA insiders, its principal function seemed to be to clip newspaper articles about the CIA and to forward them to the interested component of the agency. The press office was largely bypassed by Director Allen Dulles and a few of his chief aides who maintained contact with certain influential reporters.

Dulles often met his "friends" of the press on a background basis, and he and his Clandestine Services chief, Frank Wisner, were extremely interested in getting across to the American people the danger posed to the country by international communism. They stressed the CIA's role in combating the communist threat, and Dulles liked to brag, after the fact, about successful agency operations. The reporters who saw him were generally fascinated by his war stories of the intelligence trade. Wisner was particularly concerned with publicizing anti-communist emigre groups (many of which were subsidized or organized by the CIA), and he often encouraged reporters to write about their activities.

According to an ex-CIA official who worked closely with Wisner, the refugees from the "captive nations" were used by the CIA to give credence to the idea that the United States was truly interested in "rolling back the Iron Curtain." This same former CIA man recalls Dulles and Wisner frequently telling subordinates, in effect: "Try to do a better job in influencing the press through friendly intermediaries."

Nevertheless, the agency's press relations during the Dulles era were generally low-keyed. Reporters were not inclined to write unfavorable or revealing stories about the CIA, and the agency, for its part, received a good deal of useful information from friendly newsmen. Reporters like Joseph Alsop, Drew Pearson, Harrison Salisbury, and scores of others regularly sat down with CIA experts to be debriefed after they returned from foreign travels. These newsmen in no way worked for the agency, but they were glad to provide the incidental information that a traveler might have observed, such as the number of smokestacks on a factory or the intensity of traffic on a railroad line. The Washington bureau chief of a large newspaper remembers being asked, after he returned from Eastern Europe, "to fill in the little pieces which might fit into the jigsaw puzzle." This type of data was quite important to the intelligence analyst in the days before the technical espionage programs could supply the same information. The agency's Intelligence Directorate routinely conducted these debriefings of reporters, as it does today. Selected newsmen, however, participated in a second kind of debriefing conducted by the Clandestine Services. In these the emphasis was on the personalities of the foreign officials encountered by the newsmen (as part of the unending probe for vulnerabilities) and the operation of the internal-security systems in the countries visited.

At the same time the CIA was debriefing newsmen, it was looking for possible recruits in the press corps or hoping to place a CIA operator under "deep cover" with a reputable media outlet. The identities of these bogus "reporters" were (and are) closely guarded secrets. As late as November 1973, according to Oswald Johnston's Washington Star-News report (confirmed by other papers), there were still about forty full-time reporters and free-lancers on the CIA payroll. Johnston reported that CIA Director Colby had decided to cut the "five full-time staff correspondents with general-circulation news organizations," but that the other thirty-five or so "stringers" and workers for trade publications would be retained. American correspondents often have much broader entree to foreign societies than do officials of the local American embassy, which provides most CIA operators with their cover, and the agency simply has been unable to resist the temptation to penetrate the press corps, although the major media outlets have almost all refused to cooperate with the CIA.

William Attwood, now publisher of Newsday, remembers vividly that when he was foreign editor of Look during the 1950s a CIA representative approached him and asked if Look needed a correspondent in New Delhi. The agency offered to supply the man for the job and pay his salary. Attwood turned the agency down.

Clifton Daniel, former managing editor of the New York Times and now that paper's Washington bureau chief, states that in the late 1950s "I was very surprised to learn that a correspondent of an obscure newspaper in an obscure part of the world was a CIA man. That bothered me." Daniel promptly checked the ranks of Times reporters for similar agency connections, but found "there did not seem to be any." He believes that one reason why the Times was clean was that "our people knew they would be fired" if they worked for the agency.

In 1955 Sam Jaffe applied for a job with CBS News. While he was waiting for his application to be processed, a CIA official whom Jaffe identifies as Jerry Rubins visited his house in California and told him, "If you are willing to work for us, you are going to Moscow" with CBS. Jaffe was flabbergasted, since he did not even know at that point if CBS would hire him, and he assumes that someone at CBS must have been in on the arrangement or otherwise the agency would never have known he had applied for work. Moreover, it would have been highly unusual to send a new young reporter to such an important overseas post. Rubins told Jaffe that the agency was "willing to release certain top-secret information to you in order that you try and obtain certain information for us." Jaffe refused and was later hired by CBS for a domestic assignment.

Before the CIA's successful armed invasion of Guatemala in 1954, a Time reporter dropped off the staff to participate, by his own admission, in the agency's paramilitary operations in that country. After the Guatemalan government had been overthrown, he returned to the Time offices in New York and asked for his old job back. According to another Time staffer, the managing editor asked the returned CIA man if he were still with the agency. The man said no. The managing editor asked, "If you were still really with the CIA and I asked you about it, what would you say?" The returned CIA man replied, "I'd have to say no." Time rehired him anyway. *

The Dulles years ended with two disasters for the CIA that newspapers learned of in advance but refused to share fully with their readers. First came the shooting down of the U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union in 1960. Chalmers Roberts, long the Washington Post's diplomatic correspondent, confirms in his book First Rough Draft that he and "some other newsmen" knew about the U-2 flights in the late 1950s and "remained silent." Roberts explains, "Retrospectively, it seems a close question as to whether this was the right decision, but I think it probably was. We took the position that the national interest came before the story because we knew the United States very much needed to discover the secrets of Soviet missilery."

Most reporters at the time would have agreed with Richard Bissell that premature disclosure would have forced the Soviets "to take action." Yet Bissell admitted that "after five days" the Soviets were fully aware that the spy planes were overflying their country, and that the secrecy maintained by the Soviet and American governments was an example "of two hostile governments collaborating to keep operations secret from the general public on both sides."

The whole U-2 incident may well have been a watershed event. For much of the American press and public it was the first indication that their government lied, and it was the opening wedge in what would grow during the Vietnam years into the "credibility gap." But as the Eisenhower administration came to an end, there was still a national consensus that the fight against communism justified virtually any means. The press was very much a part of the consensus, and this did not start to crack until it became known that the CIA was organizing an armed invasion of Cuba.

Five months before the landing took place at the Bay of Pigs, the Nation published a secondhand account of the agency's efforts to train Cuban exiles for attacks against Cuba and called upon "all U.S. news media with correspondents in Guatemala," where the invaders were being trained, to check out the story. The New York Times responded on January 10, 1961, with an article describing the training, with U.S. assistance, of an anti-Castro force in Guatemala. At the end of the story, which mentioned neither the CIA nor a possible invasion, was a charge by the Cuban Foreign Minister that the U.S. government was preparing "mercenaries" in Guatemala and Florida for military action against Cuba. Turner Catledge, then the managing editor of the Times, declared in his book My Life and The Times: "I don't think that anyone who read the story would have doubted that something was in the wind, that the United States was deeply involved, or that the New York Times was onto the story."

As the date for the invasion approached, the New Republic obtained a comprehensive account of the preparations for the operation, but the liberal magazine's editor-in-chief, Gilbert Harrison, became wary of the security implications and submitted the article to President Kennedy for his advice. Kennedy asked that it not be printed, and Harrison, a friend of the President, complied. At about the same time, New York Times reporter Tad Szulc uncovered nearly the complete story, and the Times made preparations to carry it on April 7, 1961, under a four-column headline. But Times publisher Orvil Dryfoos and Washington bureau chief James Reston both objected to the article on national-security grounds, and it was edited to eliminate all mention of CIA involvement or an "imminent" invasion. The truncated story, which mentioned only that 5,000 to 6,000 Cubans were being trained in the United States and Central America "for the liberation of Cuba," no longer merited a banner headline and was reduced to a single column on the front page. Times editor Clifton Daniel later explained that Dryfoos had ordered the story toned down "above all, [out of] concern for the safety of the men who were preparing to offer their lives on the beaches of Cuba."

Times reporter Szulc states that he was not consulted about the heavy editing of his article, and he mentions that President Kennedy made a personal appeal to publisher Dryfoos not to run the story. Yet, less than a month after the invasion, at a meeting where he was urging newspaper editors not to print security information, Kennedy was able to say to the Times' Catledge, "If you had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake."

The failure of the Bay of Pigs cost CIA Director Dulles his job, and he was succeeded in November 1961 by John McCone. McCone did little to revamp the agency's policies in dealing with the press, although the matter obviously concerned him, as became evident when he reprimanded and then transferred his press officer, who he felt had been too forthcoming with a particular reporter. In McCone's first weeks at the agency, the New York Times got wind of the fact that the CIA was training Tibetans in paramilitary techniques at an agency base in Colorado, but, according to David Wise's account in The Politics of Lying, the Office of the Secretary of Defense "pleaded" with the Times to kill the story, which it did. In the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, President Kennedy again prevailed upon the Times not to print a story -- this time, the news that Soviet missiles had been installed in Cuba, which the Times had learned of at least a day before the President made his announcement to the country. *

Then, in 1964, McCone was faced with the problem of how to deal with an upcoming book about the CIA, and his response was an attempt to do violence to the First Amendment.

McCone and his deputy, Lieutenant General Marshall Carter, both personally telephoned Wise and Ross's publisher, Random House, to raise their strong objections to publication of the book. Then a CIA official offered to buy up the entire first printing of over 15,000 books. Calling this action "laughable," Random House's president, Bennett Cerf, agreed to sell the agency as many books as it wanted, but stated that additional printings would be made for the public. The agency also approached Look magazine, which had planned to run excerpts from the book, and, according to a spokesman, "asked that some changes be made-things they considered to be inaccuracies. We made a number of changes but do not consider that they were significant."

The final chapter in the agency attack against The Invisible Government came in 1965 when the CIA circulated an unattributed document on "The Soviet and Communist Bloc Defamation Campaign" to various members of Congress and the press. This long study detailed the many ways used by the KGB to discredit the CIA, including the "development and milking of Western journalists. Americans figure prominently among these." The study singled out as an example of KGB disinformation a Soviet radio broadcast that quoted directly from The Invisible Government.

The agency's message was not too subtle, but then the CIA never put its name on the document.

When Richard Helms took over the agency in 1966, press relations changed noticeably. Helms himself had been a reporter with United Press in Germany before World War II, and he thought of himself as an accomplished journalist. He would tell his subordinates, when the subject of the press came up in the agency's inner councils, that he understood reporters' problems, how their minds worked, what the CIA could and could not do with them. He had certain writing habits (which may have originated either with a strict bureau chief or a strict high-school English teacher) which set him apart from others in the clandestine part of the agency, where writing is considered a functional, as opposed to a literary, skill. For instance, he would not sign his name to any document prepared for him that included a sentence beginning with the words "however" or "therefore."

It soon became clear within the agency that Helms was intent on taking care of most of the CIA's relations with the press himself. Acutely aware that the agency's image had been badly tarnished by the Bay of Pigs and other blown operations during the early 1960s, he was determined to improve the situation. He later told a congressional committee, "In our society even a clandestine outfit cannot stray far from the norms. If we get ... the public, the press or the Congress against us, we can't hack it."

So Helms began to cultivate the press. He started a series of breakfasts, lunches, and occasional cocktail and dinner parties for individual reporters and groups of them. On days when he was entertaining a gathering of journalists, he would often devote part of his morning staff meeting to a discussion of the seating arrangements and make suggestions as to which CIA official would be the most compatible eating partner for which reporter. While a few senior clandestine personnel were invited to these affairs, Helms made sure that the majority came from the CIA's analytical and technical branches. As always, he was trying to portray the agency as a predominantly non-clandestine organization.

Helms' invitations were not for every reporter. He concentrated on what the New York Times' John Finney calls the "double-domes -the bureau chiefs, columnists, and other opinion makers." David Wise, who headed the New York Herald Tribune's Washington staff, has a similar impression: "In almost every Washington bureau, there's one guy who has access to the agency on a much higher level than the press officer. Other reporters who call up get the runaround." Finney states that Helms and his assistants would "work with flattery on the prestige of" these key journalists. CBS News' Marvin Kalb, who attended several of Helms' sessions with the press (and who was recently bugged by the Nixon administration), recalls that Helms "had the capacity for astonishing candor but told you no more than he wanted to give you. He had this marvelous way of talking, of suggesting things with his eyes. Yet, he usually didn't tell you anything."

Helms' frequent contact with reporters was not a sinister thing. He was not trying to recruit them into nefarious schemes for the CIA. Rather, he was making a concerted effort to get his and his agency's point of view across to the press and, through them, to the American public-a common activity among top government officials. Furthermore, Helms was an excellent news source-for his friends. Columnist Joseph Kraft (another Nixon-administration bugging victim) generally sums up the view of Helms by reporters who saw him frequently: "I wanted to see Helms a lot because he was talking with the top men in government. He was a good analyst -rapid, brief, and knowledgeable about what was going on." Kraft recalls that Helms was the only government official who forecast that South Vietnamese President Thieu would successfully block implementation of the Vietnamese peace accords until after the 1972 American election, and other reporters tell similar stories of Helms being among the most accurate high government sources available on matters like Soviet missiles or Chinese nuclear testing. He did not usually engage in the exaggerated talk about communist threats that so often characterizes "informed sources" in the Pentagon, and he seemed to have less of an operational ax to grind than other Washington officials.

The source of a news leak is not usually revealed in the newspapers. Yet when Helms, or any other government official, gives a "not-for-attribution" briefing to reporters, he always has a reason for doing so-which is not necessarily based on a desire to get the truth out to the American people. He may leak to promote or block a particular policy, to protect a bureaucratic flank, to launch a "trial balloon," to pass a message to a foreign government, or simply to embarrass or damage an individual. Most reporters are aware that government officials play these games; nevertheless, the CIA plays them more assiduously, since it virtually never releases any information overtly. The New York Times Washington bureau chief, Clifton Daniel, notes that although the agency issues no press releases, it leaks information "to support its own case and to serve its own purposes .... It doesn't surprise me that even secret bureaucrats would do that." Daniel says, however, that he "would accept material not-for-attribution if the past reliability of the source is good. But you have to be awfully careful that you are not being used."

In early 1968, Time magazine reporters were doing research on a cover story on the Soviet navy. According to Time's Pentagon correspondent, John Mulliken, neither the White House nor the State Department would provide information on the subject for fear of giving the Soviets the impression that the U.S. government was behind a move to play up the threat posed by the Soviet fleet. Mulliken says that, with Helms' authorization, CIA experts provided Time with virtually all the data it needed. Commenting on the incident five years later, Mulliken recalls, "I had the impression that the CIA was saying 'the hell with the others' and was taking pleasure in sticking it in." He never did find out exactly why Helms wanted that information to come out at that particular time when other government agencies did not; nor, of course, did Time's readers, who did not even know that the CIA was the source of much of the article which appeared on February 23, 1968.

From the days of Henry Luce and Allen Dulles, Time had always had. close relations with the agency. In more recent years, the magazine's chief Washington correspondent, Hugh Sidey, relates, "With McCone and Helms, we had a set-up that when the magazine was doing something on the CIA, we went to them and put it before them .... We were never misled."

Similarly, when Newsweek decided in the fall of 1971 to do a cover story on Richard Helms and "The New Espionage," the magazine, according to a Newsweek staffer, went directly to the agency for much of its information. And the article, published on November 22, 1971, generally reflected the line that Helms was trying so hard to sell: that since "the latter 1960s . . . the focus of attention and prestige within CIA" had switched from the Clandestine Services to the analysis of intelligence, and that "the vast majority of recruits are bound for" the Intelligence Directorate. This was, of course, written at a time when over two thirds of the agency's budget and personnel were devoted to covert operations and their support (roughly the same percentage as had existed for the preceding ten years). Newsweek did uncover several previously unpublished anecdotes about past covert operations (which made the CIA look good) and published at least one completely untrue statement concerning a multibillion-dollar technical espionage program. Assuming that the facts for this statement were provided by "reliable intelligence sources," it probably represented a CIA disinformation attempt designed to make the Russians believe something untrue about U.S. technical collection capabilities.

Under Helms, the CIA also continued its practice of intervening with editors and publishers to try to stop publication of books either too descriptive or too critical of the agency. In April 1972 this book -as yet unwritten-was enjoined; two months later, the number-two man in the Clandestine Services, Cord Meyer, Jr., visited the New York offices of Harper & Row, Inc., on another anti-book mission. The publisher had announced the forthcoming publication of a book by Alfred McCoy called The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, charging the agency with a certain degree of complicity in the Southeast Asian drug traffic. Meyer asked old acquaintances among Harper & Row's top management to provide him with a copy of the book's galley proofs. While the CIA obviously hoped to handle the matter informally among friends, Harper & Row asked the agency for official confirmation of its request. The CIA's General Counsel, Lawrence Houston, responded with a letter of July 5, 1972, that while the agency's intervention "in no way affects the right of a publisher to decide what to publish ... I find it difficult to believe ... that a responsible publisher would wish to be associated with an attack on our Government involving the vicious international drug traffic without at least trying to ascertain the facts." McCoy maintained that the CIA had "no legal right to review the book" and that "submitting the manuscript to the CIA for prior review is to agree to take the first step toward abandoning the First Amendment protection against prior censorship." Harper & Row apparently disagreed and made it clear to McCoy that the book would not be published unless first submitted. Rather than find a new publisher at that late date, McCoy went along. He also gave the entire story to the press, which was generally critical of the CIA.

The agency listed its objections to Harper & Row on July 28, and, in the words of the publisher's vice president and general counsel, B. Brooks Thomas, the agency's criticisms "were pretty general and we found ourselves rather underwhelmed by them." Harper & Row proceeded to publish the book-unchanged-in the middle of August.

The CIA has also used the American press more directly in its efforts against the KGB. On October 2, 1971, the week after the British government expelled 105 Soviet officials from England because of their alleged intelligence activities, the New York Times ran a front-page article by Benjamin Welles about Soviet spying around the world. Much of the information in the article came from the CIA, and it mentioned, among other things, that many of the Russians working at the United Nations were KGB operators. According to Welles, the agency specifically "fingered as a KGB man" a Russian in the U.N. press office, Vladimir P. Pavlichenko, and asked that he be mentioned in the article. Welles complied and included a paragraph of biographical information on the Russian, supplied by the CIA. Ten days later the Soviet Union made an official protest to the U.S. government about the "slanderous" reports in the American press concerning Soviet officials employed at the U.N.

The Times' charges about espionage activities of the Soviets at the U.N. were almost certainly accurate. But, as a Washington-based media executive familiar with the case states, "The truth of the charges has nothing to do with the question of whether an American newspaper should allow itself to become involved in the warfare between opposing intelligence services without giving its readers an idea of what is happening. If the CIA wants to make a public statement about a Soviet agent at the U.N. or the U.S. government wants to expel the spy for improper activities, such actions would be legitimate subjects for press coverage-but to cooperate with the agency in 'fingering' the spy, without informing the reader, is at best not straightforward reporting."

The CIA has often made communist defectors available to selected reporters so news stories can be written (and propaganda victories gained). As was mentioned earlier, most of these defectors are almost completely dependent on the CIA, and are carefully coached on what they can and cannot say. Defectors unquestionably are legitimate subjects of the press's attention, but it is unfortunate that their stories are filtered out to the American people in such controlled circumstances.

David Wise remembers an incident at the New York Herald Tribune in the mid-1960s when the CIA called the paper's top officials and arranged to have a Chinese defector made available to reporters. According to Wise, CIA officials "brought him down from Langley [for the interview] and then put him back on ice." Similarly, in 1967 the agency asked the Times' Welles to come out to CIA headquarters to talk to the Soviet defector Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeny Runge. On November 10 Welles wrote two articles based on the interview with Runge and additional material on the KBG supplied by CIA officers. But Welles also included in his piece several paragraphs discussing the CIA's motivation in making Runge available to the press. The article mentioned that at least some U.S. intelligence officials desired "to counter the international attention, much of it favorable, surrounding the Soviet Union's 50th anniversary," which was then taking place. Publicizing the defection, Welles continued, "also gave United States intelligence men a chance to focus public attention on what they consider a growing emphasis on the use of 'illegal' Soviet agents around the world."

According to Welles, these paragraphs stating, in effect, that the CIA was exploiting Runge's defection for its own purposes infuriated the agency, and he was "cut off" by his CIA sources. He experienced "long periods of coolness" and was told by friends in the agency that Helms had personally ordered that he was to be given no stories for several months.

The CIA is perfectly ready to reward its friends. Besides provision of big news breaks such as defector stories, selected reporters may receive "exclusives" on everything from U.S. government foreign policy to Soviet intentions. Hal Hendrix, described by three different Washington reporters as a known "friend" of the agency, won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1962 Miami Daily News reporting of the Cuban missile crisis. * Much of his "inside story" was truly inside: it was based on CIA leaks.

Because of the CIA's clever handling of reporters and because of the personal views held by many of those reporters and their editors, most of the American press has at least tacitly gone along, until the last few years, with the agency view that covert operations are not a proper subject for journalistic scrutiny. The credibility gap arising out of the Vietnam war, however, may well have changed the attitude of many reporters. The New York Times' Tom Wicker credits the Vietnam experience with making the press "more concerned with its fundamental duty." Now that most reporters have seen repeated examples of government lying, he believes, they are much less likely to accept CIA denials of involvement in covert operations at home and abroad. As Wicker points out, "Lots of people today would believe that the CIA overthrows governments," and most journalists no longer "believe in the sanctity of classified material." In the case of his own paper, the New York Times, Wicker feels that "the Pentagon Papers made the big difference."

The unfolding of the Watergate scandal has also opened up the agency to increased scrutiny. Reporters have dug deeply into the CIA's assistance to the White House "plumbers" and the attempts to involve the agency in the Watergate cover-up. Perhaps most important, the press has largely rejected the "national security" defense used by the White House to justify its actions. With any luck at all, the American people can look forward to learning from the news media what their government-even its secret part-is doing. As Congress abdicates its responsibility, and as the President abuses his responsibility, we have nowhere else to turn.

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Notes:

* Colby's claim that these committees were informed conflicts directly with the 1971 statements of the late Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman, Allen Ellender (quoted later in this chapter), that he knew nothing about the CIA's 36,000-man"secret" army in Laos.

** These provisions, along with Congress' practice of hiding the CIA's budget in appropriations to other government departments, may well violate the constitutional requirement that "No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time." A legal challenge (Higgs et al. v. Helms et al.) to the CIA's secrecy in budgetary matters, based on these constitutional grounds, is currently pending in the federal court system.

* Over the last twenty-five years this body has also been called the Special Group, the 54-12 Group, and the 303 Committee. Its name has changed with new administrations or whenever its existence has become publicly known.

* In addition to Kissinger, they are currently the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Director of Central Intelligence, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

* Final approval for a covert-action program is normally given by the 40 Committee chairman-still Henry Kissinger, even since he has become Secretary of State. He, in turn, notifies the President of what has been decided, and if there is a matter on which the committee was in disagreement, the chief executive makes the final decision. Although the President either reviews or personally authorizes all these secret interventions in other countries' internal affairs, he never signs any documents to that effect. Instead, the onus is placed on the 40 Committee, and if he chooses, the President can "plausibly deny" he has been involved in any illegal activities overseas.

* In February 1974, the PFIAB's members in addition to Admiral Anderson were Dr. William Baker, Bell Telephone Laboratories' Vice President for Research; John Connally, former Governor of Texas and Secretary of the Navy and the Treasury; Leo Cherne, Executive Director of the Research Institute of America; Dr. John Foster, former Director of Defense Department Research and Engineering; Robert Galvin, President of Motorola; Gordon Gray, former Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs; Dr. Edwin Land, President of Polaroid; Clare Boothe Luce, former Congresswoman and ambassador; Nelson Rockefeller, former Governor of New York; and Dr. Edward Teller, nuclear physicist and "father" of the hydrogen bomb.

* (DELETED)

* Anderson's fears seemed partially justified, however, in 1971, when Mintoff precipitated a mini-crisis by expelling the N.A.T.O. commander from the island and by greatly increasing the cost to Britain of keeping its facilities there. In an incident reminiscent of Cyprus President Makarios' blackmail of U.S. intelligence several years before, the U.S. government was forced to contribute several million dollars to help the British pay the higher rent for the Maltese bases.

* Although Helms had been for many years providing current intelligence and estimates to congressional committees in secret oral briefings, the CIA officially opposed legislation introduced in 1972 by Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky which would have provided the appropriate committees with the same sort of data in the form of regular CIA reports. The bill was favorably approved by the Foreign Relations Committee, but subsequently died in Armed Services. Director-designate William Colby told the latter committee in July 1973 that he thought this information could be supplied on an informal basis "without legislation."

* A relatively similar procedure is followed when an individual Senator or Congressman writes to the CIA about a covert operation. Instead of sending a letter in return, an agency representative offers to brief the legislator personally on the matter, on the condition that no staff members are present. This procedure puts the busy lawmaker at a marked disadvantage, since his staff is usually more familiar with the subject than he is -- and probably wrote the original letter.

* Seven years later, the same panel would investigate the 1971 assistance furnished by the Clandestine Services to E. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy for their "plumbers" operations-assistance comprised of many of the same gadgets that amused the Senators in 1966.

* Barnds had been with the agency's Office of National Estimates until he joined the staff of the Council on Foreign Relations in the mid-1960s. In 1968 he was the secretary at the CFR session where Richard Bissell laid out his views on covert operations.

* More recently CIA men have turned up as "reporters" in foreign countries for little-known publications which could not possibly afford to pay their salaries without agency assistance. Stanley Karnow, formerly the Washington Post's Asian correspondent, recalls, "I remember a guy who came to Korea with no visible means of support. He was supposed to be a correspondent for a small paper in New York. In a country where it takes years to build up acquaintances, he immediately had good contacts, and he dined with the CIA station chief. It was common knowledge he worked for the agency."

• According to the Times' Max Frankel, writing in the Winter 1973 Columbia Forum, there was still a feeling that the paper had been "remiss" in withholding information on the Bay of Pigs, so the Times extracted a promise from the President that while the paper remained silent he would "shed no blood and start no war." Frankel notes that "no such bargain was ever struck again, though many officials made overtures. The essential ingredient was trust, and that was lost somewhere between Dallas and Tonkin."

* This is the same Hal Hendrix who later joined ITT and sent the memo saying President Nixon had given the "green light" for covert U.S. intervention in Chile. See p. 350 above.

In the eyes of posterity it will inevitably seem that, in safeguarding our freedom, we destroyed it; that the vast clandestine apparatus we built up to probe our enemies' resources and intentions only served in the end to confuse our own purposes; that the practice of deceiving others for the good of the state led infallibly to our deceiving ourselves; and that the vast army of intelligence personnel built up to execute these purposes were soon caught up in the web of their own sick fantasies, with disastrous consequences to them and us.-- MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE, May 1966

IT is a multi-purpose, clandestine arm of power . . . more than an intelligence or counterintelligence organization. It is an instrument for subversion, manipulation, and violence, for the secret intervention in the affairs of other countries." Allen Dulles wrote those words about the KGB in 1963 so that Americans would better understand the nature of the Soviet security service. His description was a correct one, but he could-just as accurately-have used the same terms to describe his own CIA. He did not, of course, because the U.S. leaders of Dulles' generation generally tried to impute the worst possible methods and motives to the forces of international communism, while casting the "defensive actions of the free world" as honest and democratic. Both sides, however, resorted to ruthless tactics. Neither was reluctant to employ trickery, deceit, or, in Dulles' phrase, "subversion, manipulation, and violence." They both operated clandestinely, concealing their activities not so much from the "opposition" (they couldn't) as from their own peoples. Secrecy itself became a way of life, and it could not be challenged without fear of a charge that one was unpatriotic or unmindful of the "national security."

In the dark days of the Cold War the communist threat was real to most Americans. Sincere men believed that the enemy's dirtiest tricks must be countered. Fire was to be fought with fire, and America's small elite corps of intelligence professionals claimed they knew how to do this. The public and the country's leaders were willing to go along, if not always enthusiastically, at least without serious opposition. Consequently, clandestine operatives from the United States as well as the Soviet Union were turned loose in virtually every nation in the world. Each side won secret victories, but the overall results were decidedly mixed. For its part, the CIA played some role in forestalling a communist takeover of Western Europe, but the agency's record in the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere in the world left much to be desired.

When the CIA's invaders were defeated in 1961 on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs, it should have been a signal to the country that something was wrong-both with the CIA and the government that directed the secret agency's activities. It should have been clear that events in the Third World could (and should) no longer be easily and blatantly manipulated by Washington. It should have been obvious that the times were rapidly changing; that the fears, following on the heels of World War II, that the "communist monolith" was on the verge of dominating the "free world" were invalid. It should have been apparent to the American public that the CIA was living in the past.

Columnist Tom Braden, a former high-ranking CIA covert expert, reflecting on the latter-day life of the CIA, wrote in January 1973: "Josef Stalin's decision to attempt conquest of Western Europe by manipulation, the use of fronts and the purchasing of loyalty turned the Agency into a house of dirty tricks. It was necessary. Absolutely necessary, in my view. But it lasted long after the necessity was gone."

Yet after the initial public outcry over the Cuban fiasco, the personnel shake-up at the agency and the high-level reviews of its performance ordered by President Kennedy had little effect. The CIA went back to operating essentially the same way it had for the previous decade, again with at least the tacit acceptance of the American public. Not until the Indochinese war shocked and outraged a significant part of the population were CIA's tactics, such as secret subsidies, clandestine armies, and covert coups, seriously called into question. Now Watergate has brought the issue of an inadequately controlled secret intelligence agency home to us. The clandestine techniques developed over a quarter-century of Cold War have, at last, been dramatically displayed for the people of this country, and the potential danger of a CIA which functions solely at the command of the President has been demonstrated to the public.

The CIA has a momentum of its own, and its operatives continue to ply their trade behind their curtain of secrecy. They do not want to give up their covert activities, their dirty tricks. They believe in these methods and they rather enjoy the game. Of course, without a presidential mandate they would have to stop, but the country has not had a chief executive since the agency's inception who has not believed in the fundamental need and rightness of CIA intervention in the internal affairs of other nations. When a President has perceived American interests to be threatened in some faraway land, he has usually been willing to try to change the course of events by sending in the CIA. That these covert interventions often are ineffective, counterproductive, or damaging to the national interest has not prevented Presidents from attempting them.

(DELETED) Kissinger and Nixon were concerned with what they believe to be a legitimate end-preventing a Marxist from being elected President of Chile-and the means employed mattered little to them, as long as secrecy could be maintained.

The new CIA Director, William Colby, has indicated on the public record that he intends to keep the agency functioning largely as it has in the past (while pledging to shun future "Watergates"). When Senator Harold Hughes asked him where the line should be drawn between the use of CIA paramilitary warriors and the regular U.S. armed forces, Colby replied that the dividing line should be "at the point in which the United States acknowledges involvement in such activities." Senator Hughes specifically put this answer into perspective when he said on August 1, 1973, "Mr. Colby believes that CIA-run military operations are perfectly acceptable as long as they can be concealed."

Colby's-and the CIA's and the Nixon administration's-view that "deniability" somehow allows the United States a free hand for covert intervention abroad (and at home) is an anachronistic hangover from the Cold War. Perhaps such actions could once have been justified when the future of the country was seemingly at stake, but no such threat now looms on the horizon. The only two foreign powers with the potential to threaten the United States -the Soviet Union and China-have long ceased to be meaningful targets of CIA secret operations. Instead, the agency works mainly in the Third World, in nations that pose no possible threat to American security (DELETED) The CIA is not defending our national security. It seeks rather to maintain the status quo, to hold back the cultural clock, in areas that are of little or no significance to the American people. These efforts are often doomed to failure. In fact, at least since 1961, the CIA has lost many more battles than it has won, even by its own standards. Furthermore, the very fact that the United States operates an active CIA around the world has done incalculable harm to the nation's international position. Not only have millions of people abroad been alienated by the CIA's activities, but so have been a large number of Americans, especially young people.

The time has come for the United States to stand openly behind its actions overseas, to lead by example rather than manipulation. The changeover might disturb those government officials who believe in the inherent right of the United States to exercise its power everywhere, clandestinely when that seems necessary; but in the long run non-interference and forthrightness would enhance America's international prestige and position.

Even in an era when the public is conditioned to ever expanding and ever more expensive government activities, the $6 billion yearly cost of American intelligence represents a significant slice of the national treasure. The government spends more money on the various forms of spying than it does on the war against crime and drugs, community development and housing, mass transportation systems, and even the country's overt international programs carried out by the State Department, the USIA, and the AID combined. Yet, unlike other federal activities, information on the intelligence community-how much money is being spent and where the money goes-is systematically withheld from the American people and all but a handful of Congressmen. Behind this wall of secrecy (which exists as much to conceal waste and inefficiency as to protect "national security") intelligence has grown far beyond the needs of the nation.

The time has come to demysticize the intelligence profession, to disabuse Americans of the ideas that clandestine agents somehow make the world a safer place to live in, that excessive secrecy is necessary to protect the national security. These notions simply are not true; the CIA and the other intelligence agencies have merely used them to build their own covert empire. The U.S. intelligence community performs a vital service in keeping track of and analyzing the military capability and strengths of the Soviet Union and China, but its other functions-the CIA's dirty tricks and classical espionage-are, on the whole, a liability for the country, on both practical and moral grounds.

But because of bureaucratic tribalism, vested interests, and the enormous size of the intelligence community, internal reform never makes more than a marginal dent in the community's operations. The people in charge like things essentially as they are, and they have never been subjected to the kind of intense outside pressure which leads to change in our society. Presidents, furthermore, have not wanted to greatly disturb the existing system because they have always wanted more, if not better, intelligence; because they were afraid of opening up the secret world of intelligence to public scrutiny; because they did not want to risk losing their personal action arm for intervention abroad.

The Congress, which has the constitutional power and, indeed, the responsibility to monitor the CIA and U.S. intelligence, has almost totally failed to exercise meaningful control. Intelligence has always been the sacred shibboleth which could not be disturbed without damaging the "national security," and, despite loud protests from a few outspoken critics, neither legislative house has been willing to question seriously the scope or the size of intelligence activities. Yet, if there is to be any real, meaningful change in the intelligence community, it must come from Congress, and, judging from past experience, Congress will act only if prodded by public opinion. The Watergate affair has, to some extent, played such a role, and the full review of the CIA's secret charter promised by Senate Armed Services chairman John Stennis should be the first step in limiting the CIA's covert operations and cutting down the duplication and inefficiency of the rest of the community.

Congress should require the various intelligence agencies to keep it informed of the information collected. This kind of data should be routinely supplied to the legislative branch so it can properly carry out its foreign-policy functions and vote funds for the national defense. If the same information can be given to foreign governments and selectively leaked to the press by administrations in search of votes on military-spending issues, then there is no "security" reason why it must be denied to the Congress. The Soviets know that U.S. spy satellites observe their country and that other electronic devices monitor their activities; it makes little sense to classify the intelligence gathered "higher than top secret." No one is asking that technical details such as how the cameras work be given to the Congress or made public-but the excessive secrecy which surrounds the finished intelligence product could certainly be eased without in any way limiting the nation's ability to collect raw intelligence data by technical means.

As for the CIA proper, Congress should take action to limit the agency to the role originally set out for it in the National Security Act of 1947-namely, the CIA should concern itself exclusively with coordinating and evaluating intelligence. At the minimum, if clandestine activities must be continued by the U.S. government, the operational part of the CIA should be separated from the noncovert components. In the analytical and technical field the agency can make its most important contribution to the national security, but these functions have been neglected and at times distorted by the clandestine operatives who have almost always been in control of the CIA. Intelligence should not be presented to the nation's policy-makers by the same men who are trying to justify clandestine operations. The temptation to use field information selectively and to evaluate information to serve operational interests can be irresistible to the most honest men-let alone to the clandestine operatives.

However, the best solution would be not simply to separate the Clandestine Services from the rest of the CIA, but to abolish them completely. The few clandestine functions which still serve a useful purpose could be transferred to other government departments, but, for the most part, such activities should be eliminated. This would deprive the government of its arsenal of dirty tricks, but the republic could easily sustain the loss-and be the better for it.

The Clandestine Services' espionage operations using human agents have already been made obsolete by the technical collection systems which, along with open sources, supply the United States government with almost all the information it needs on the military strength and deployments of the Soviet Union and China. The truly valuable technical systems-the satellites and electronic listening devices-should be maintained, although without the present duplication and bureaucratic inefficiency. Since Oleg Penkovsky's arrest by Soviet authorities in 1962, there has been no CIA spy who has supplied the United States with important information about any communist power, and it is difficult to justify the expenditure of over $1 billion in the last decade for classical espionage simply on the hope that another Penkovsky will someday offer himself up as a CIA agent. Assuming that the CIA's most valuable agents will continue to be volunteers -- "walk-ins" and defectors -- a small office attached to the State Department and embassy contacts could be established to receive the information supplied by these sources.

While the CIA has been much more successful in penetrating the governments of the Third World and some of America's allies, the information received is simply not that important and can be duplicated to some extent through diplomatic and open sources. While it might be interesting to know about the inner workings of a particular Latin American, Asian, or African country, this intelligence has little practical use if the CIA has no intention of manipulating the local power structure.

The Clandestine Services' counterespionage functions should be taken over by the FBI. Protecting the United States against foreign spies is supposed to be the bureau's function anyway, and the incessant game-playing with foreign intelligence services-the provocations, deceptions, and double agents-would quickly become a relic of the past if the CIA were not involved in its own covert operations. Playing chess with the taxpayers' money against the KGB is unquestionably a fascinating exercise for clandestine operatives, but one that can properly be handled by the internal-security agency of the United States, the FBI.

As for the CIA's paramilitary tasks, they have no place in an intelligence agency, no place in a democratic society. Under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war, and the United States should never again become involved in armed conflict without full congressional approval and public knowledge. If "American advisors" are needed to assist another country legitimately, they can be supplied by the Pentagon. The other forms of covert action-propaganda, subversion, manipulation of governments- should simply be discontinued. These are more often than not counterproductive and, even when successful, contrary to the most basic American ideals. The CIA's proprietary companies should be shut down or sold off. The agency would have little use for one of the largest aircraft networks in the world if it were not constantly intervening in foreign countries. The proprietaries, with their unregulated profits, potential conflicts of interest, and doubtful business practices, should in no case be allowed to continue operations.

The other countries of the world have a fundamental right not to have any outside power interfere in their internal affairs. The United States, which solemnly pledged to uphold this right when it ratified the United Nations charter, should now honor it. The mechanisms used to intervene overseas ignore and undermine American constitutional processes and pose a threat to the democratic system at home. The United States is surely strong enough as a nation to be able to climb out of the gutter and conduct its foreign policy in accordance with the ideals that the country was founded upon.

The Chairman, Mr. Dillon, opened the meeting, noting that although this entire series of discussion was "off-the-record," the subject of discussion for this particular meeting was especially sensitive and subject to the previously announced restrictions.

Mr. Dillon noted that problems involving CIA's relationships with private institutions would be examined at a later meeting, though neither Mr. Bissell nor others should feel restricted in discussion of such problems this evening.

As the session's discussion leader, Mr. Bissell offered a review and appraisal of covert operations in U.S. foreign policy.

Touching briefly upon the question of responsibility, of whether these agencies are instruments of national policy, Mr. Bissell remarked that, in such a group, he needn't elaborate on CIA's responsiveness to national policy; that we could assume that, although CIA participates in policy making (as do other "action agencies," such as AID, the military services and Departments, in addition to the Department of State), CIA was a responsible agency of national policy.

Indeed, in Mr. Bissell's personal experience, CIA's role was more carefully circumscribed and the established limits observed more attentively than in ECA, where Mr. Bissell had previously worked.

The essential control of CIA resided in a Cabinet-level committee, comprising a representative of the White House staff, the Under Secretary of State, Deputy Secretary of Defense, and in recent years the personal participation of the Director of Central Intelligence. Over the years this committee has become a more powerful and effective device for enforcing control. It reviews all new projects, and periodically scrutinizes ongoing projects.

As an interdepartmental committee composed of busy officials who meet only once per week, this control group is of limited effectiveness. Were it the only control instrument, Mr. Bissell would view it as inadequate, but in fact this committee is merely the summit of control, with a series of intermediate review procedures as lower levels. Projects are usually discussed in the relevant office of the Assistant Secretary of State, and, if at all related to Defense Department interests, at a similar level in DoD, frequently after consideration at lower levels in these departments. It was rare to take an issue before the Special Group prior to discussion at lower levels, and if there was objection at lower levels, most issues were not proposed to the Special Group--excepting large projects or key issues, which would be appealed at every level, including the Special Group.

Similar procedures applied in the field. Generally the Ambassador had a right to know of any covert operations in his jurisdiction, although in special cases (as a result of requests from the local Chief of State or the Secretary of State) the chief of station was instructed to withhold information from the Ambassador. Indeed, in one case the restriction was imposed upon the specific exhortation of the Ambassador in question, who preferred to remain ignorant of certain activities.

Of the "blown" operations, frequently among the larger ones, most are known to have been approved by the President himself. The U-2 project, for example, was an off-shoot of the Land (intelligence) Committee of the Killian panel on surprise attack; it was proposed as a Killian panel recommendation to the President, supported by USIB; its procurement, in utmost secrecy, was authorized by the President, and, with the exception of the first few flights (the initial authorization being to operate for a period of ten days, "weather permitting"), each individual flight was authorized by the President, with participation by the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense.

Covert operations should, for some purposes, be divided into two classifications: (l) Intelligence collection, primarily espionage, or the obtaining of intelligence by covert means; and (2) Covert action, attempting to influence the internal affairs of other nations-sometimes called "intervention"-by covert means.

Although these two categories of activity can be separated in theory, intelligence collection and covert action interact and overlap. Efforts have been made historically to separate the two functions but the result has usually been regarded as "a total disaster organizationally." One such attempt was the establishment in the early days of CIA (1948) of the OPC under Frank G. Wisner as a separate organ for covert action. Although supported and given cover by the CIA, this organization was independent and Wisner reported directly to the Secretaries of State and Defense. "Beedle" Smith decided when he became Director of Central Intelligence that, if he were responsible for OPC, he was going to run it and it was merged with the clandestine intelligence organization in such a way that within the combined Clandestine Service there was a complete integration of intelligence collection and covert action functions in each area division.

In addition to our experience with OPC, the Germans and the British for a time during the war had organizations for covert special operations separate from, and inevitably in competition with, their espionage services. In every case the experience has been unfortunate. Although there are many disagreements within CIA on matters of doctrine, the view is unanimous that the splitting of intelligence and covert action services would be disastrous, with resulting competition for recruitment of agents, multiple recruitment of the same agents, additional security risks, and dissipation of effort.

Concerning the first category, intelligence collection, we should ask: (a) What is the scope of "covert intelligence collection"? (b) What intelligence collection functions can best be performed covertly?

Although it is less effective, classical espionage is "much the least costly," with the hardware components of recon and NSA activities raising their costs considerably.

(In the after-dinner discussion, an authority on communications-electronics expressed his concurrence in Mr. Bissell's relative rankings. Notwithstanding technological advances in cryptology, the increased sophistication in most cryptosystems assured that (1) (reconnaissance) outranked (2). Another observer noted that the budgets correlated in similar manner, the former speaker concurring and noting that, however surprising, the budgets approximated maximum utility according to cost-effectiveness criteria.)

Postwar U.S. reconnaissance operations began, historically, as "covert" operations, primarily a series of clandestine overflights of Communist territory in Eastern Europe, inaugurated in the early 1950s. These early efforts were followed by the U-2 project, which provided limited coverage but dramatic results.

Now we have reconnaissance satellites. Overhead reconnaissance is one of the most open of "secrets" in international affairs; it is no longer really a "covert activity," and bureaucratic responsibility for it now resides in the Pentagon.

Classical espionage, in the early postwar years, was conducted with special intensity in West Germany, and before the Berlin wall, in that city, which was ideal for the moving of agents in both directions, providing a sizable flow of political and economic intelligence (especially from East Germany).

Throughout the period since the early fifties, of course, the Communist bloc, and more especially the U.S.S.R. itself, has been recognized as the primary target for espionage activities. Circumstances have greatly limited the scale of operations that could be undertaken within the bloc so much of the effort has been directed at bloc nationals stationed in neutral or friendly areas, and at "third country" operations that seek to use the nationals of other non-Communist countries as sources of information on the Soviet bloc.

More recently there has been a shift in priorities for classical espionage toward targets in the underdeveloped world. Partly as a result of this change in priorities and partly because of other developments, the scale of the classical espionage effort mounted in Europe has considerably diminished. The U.S.S.R. remains a prime target but Communist China would today be given the same priority.

As to the kinds of information that could be obtained, espionage has been of declining relative importance as a means of learning about observable developments, such as new construction, the characteristics of transportation systems, the strength and deployment of military forces and the like because reconnaissance has become a far more effective collection technique and (except in China) travel is freer and far more extensive than some years ago. It had been hoped that espionage would contribute to the collection of intelligence on Soviet and East European technology, since this is a body of information not readily observable (until embodied in operational systems). Another type of intelligence for which espionage would seem to be the only available technique is that concerning enemy intentions. In practice however espionage has been disappointing with respect to both these types of intelligence. They are for obvious reasons closely guarded and the task is just too difficult to permit results to be obtained with any dependability or regularity. With respect to the former category -- technology- the published literature and direct professional contacts with the scientific community have been far richer sources.

(A communications-electronics expert interjected the observation that the same reasoning applied to inadequacies in S&T intelligence collection; technology is just too difficult for agents, who are insufficiently trained to comprehend what they observe as the technologies become increasingly complicated.)

As to friendly neutrals and allies, it is usually easier to learn what one wishes by overt contacts, human contacts of overt members of the U.S. mission or private citizens. We don't need espionage to learn British, or even French intentions.

(The speaker was questioned as to whether the other side's espionage was of similarly limited utility, or whether-with their Philbys-they were more successful?)

Mr. Bissell remarked that Soviet Union successes were primarily in counterintelligence, though going back aways, the Soviet Union had been more successful in recruiting U.S. scientists.

(The question was raised as to whether Burgess and MacLean constituted merely C.I. successes.)

Mr. Bissell thought so.

(In another's recollection, Soviet atomic intelligence efforts had been of substantial assistance in facilitating the Soviet nuclear weapons program. Although it is not possible to estimate with precision the effects of this intelligence, it was Lewis Strauss's guess that atomic intelligence successes allowed the Soviets to detonate their first device at least one and one-half and perhaps as much as two and one-half years before such a test would have been possible with purely indigenous efforts.)

The general conclusion is that against the Soviet bloc or other sophisticated societies, espionage is not a primary source of intelligence, although it has had occasional brilliant successes (like the Berlin Tunnel and several of the high level defectors). A basic reason is that espionage operates mainly through the recruitment of agents and it is enormously difficult to recruit high level agents. A low level agent, even assuming that he remained loyal and that there is some means of communicating with him[,] simply cannot tell you much of what you want to know. The secrets we cannot find out by reconnaissance or from open sources are in the minds of scientists and senior policy makers and are not accessible to an ordinary citizen even of middle rank.

In contrast, the underdeveloped world presents greater opportunities for covert intelligence collection, simply because governments are much less highly oriented; there is less security consciousness; and there is apt to be more actual or potential diffusion of power among parties, localities, organizations, and individuals outside of the central governments. The primary purpose of espionage in these areas is to provide Washington with timely knowledge of the internal power balance, a form of intelligence that is primarily of tactical significance.

Why is this relevant?

Changes in the balance of power are extremely difficult to discern except through frequent contact with power elements. Again and again we have been surprised at coups within the military; often, we have failed to talk to the junior officers or non-corns who are involved in the coups. The same problem applies to labor leaders, and others. Frequently we don't know of power relationships, because power balances are murky and sometimes not well known even to the principal actors. Only by knowing the principal players well do you have a chance of careful prediction. There is real scope for action in this area; the technique is essentially that of "penetration," including "penetrations" of the sort which horrify classicists of covert operations, with a disregard for the "standards" and "agent recruitment rules." Many of the "penetrations" don't take the form of "hiring" but of establishing a close or friendly relationship (which mayor may not be furthered by the provision of money from time to time).

In some countries the CIA representative has served as a close counselor (and in at least one case a drinking companion) of the chief of state. These are situations, of course, in which the tasks of intelligence collection and political action overlap to the point of being almost indistinguishable.

(The question was raised as to why ordinary diplomats couldn't maintain these relationships.)

Mr. Bissell observed that often they could. There were special cases, however, such as in one Republic where the chief of state had a "special relationship" with the senior CIA officers without the knowledge of the U.S. Ambassador because the President of the Republic had so requested it. The CIA man sent reports by CIA channels back to the Secretary of State, but the Ambassador in the field, as agreed by the Secretary of State, wasn't to be informed. In this case, a problem arose when the relevant Assistant Secretary of State (who had received cables from the CIA man) became the new Ambassador, but the President of the Republic liked the new Ambassador and asked that a "special relationship" be established with him too.

Aside from this unique case, it seems to have been true generally that the Ambassador has to be a formal representative of the United States most of whose relations with the government to which he is accredited are through or with the knowledge of its foreign office. On the other hand, the CIA representative can maintain a more intimate and informal relationship the privacy of which can be better preserved both within the government of the country in question and within the United States government. Moreover, if a chief of state leaves the scene or changes his mind, you can quietly move a station chief, but it could be embarrassing if it were necessary suddenly to recall the U.S. Ambassador.

(Was the previously described relationship really a "covert operation"?)

The "cover" may be to shield visibility from some junior officials or, in the case of a "private adviser" to a chief of state, to shield this fact from politicians of the local government.

(Another observation was that the method of reporting, through CIA channels, constituted one difference and had some influence. A chief of state who knew that CIA's reports would be handled in a smaller circle, with less attendant publicity, might prefer these channels for some communications.)

Concerning the second category, covert action:

The scope of covert action could include: (I) political advice and counsel; (2) subsidies to an individual; (3) financial support and "technical assistance" to political parties; (4) support of private organizations, including labor unions, business firms, cooperatives, etc.; (5) covert propaganda; (6) "private" training of individuals and exchange of persons; (7) economic operations; and (8) paramilitary [or] political action operations designed to overthrow or to support a regime (like the Bay of Pigs and the programs in Laos). These operations can be classified in various ways: by the degree and type of secrecy required [,] by their legality, and, perhaps, by their benign or hostile character.

From whom is the activity to be kept secret? After five days, for example, the U-2 flights were not secret from the Russians but these operations remained highly secret in the United States, and with good reason. If these overflights had "leaked" to the American press, the U.S.S.R. would have had been forced to take action. On a less severe level the same problem applies to satellite reconnaissance. These are examples of two hostile governments collaborating to keep operations secret from the general public of both sides. "Unfortunately, there aren't enough of these situations."

(The remark was interjected that there was another reason for secrecy; if one had to admit to the activity, one would have to show the results, and exactly how good or bad they were.)

Covert operations could be classified by their legality or illegality. Many of them are legal.

They can also be classified as "benign" or "hostile." Most operations in Western Europe have been "benign," though involving the gravest improprieties, and in some cases clearly illegal action. (E.g., covert support of political parties.)

In the case of a large underdeveloped country, for example, money was put into a party's funds without the knowledge of that party. The relatively few economic operations that have been undertaken have been both benign and legal. One of these involved the provision by CIA of interim ostensibly private financing of an overt project pending an overt and official loan by AID. Its purpose was to give AID time for some hard bargaining without causing a complete failure of the transaction. The stereotype, of course, is that all covert operations are illegal and hostile, but this is not really the case.

The role of covert intervention can best be understood by contrast with the overt activities of the United States government. Diplomacy seeks results by bargaining on a government-to-government basis, sometimes openly-sometimes privately. Foreign economic policy and cultural programs seek to modify benignly the economies of other countries and the climate of opinion within them. Covert intervention is usually designed to operate on the internal power balance, often with fairly short-term objectives in view. An effort to build up the economy of an underdeveloped country must be subtle, long continued, probably quite costly, and must openly enlist the cooperation of major groups within the country if it is to have much influence. On the other hand an effort to weaken the local Communist party or to win an election, and to achieve results within at most two or three years, must obviously be covert, it must pragmatically use the people and the instrumentalities that are available and the methods that seem likely to work. It is not surprising that the practitioners within the United States government of these two types of intervention differ temperamentally and in their preferences for methods, friends, and ideologies.

The essence of such intervention in the internal power balance is the identification of allies who can be rendered more effective, more powerful, and perhaps wiser through covert assistance. Typically these local allies know the source of the assistance but neither they nor the United States could afford to admit to its existence. Agents for fairly minor and low sensitivity interventions, for instance some covert propaganda and certain economic activities, can be recruited simply with money. But for the larger and more sensitive interventions, the allies must have their own motivation. On the whole the Agency has been remarkably successful in finding individuals and instrumentalities with which and through which it could work in this fashion. Implied in the requirement for a pre-existing motivation is the corollary that an attempt to induce the local ally to follow a course he does not believe in will at least reduce his effectiveness and may destroy the whole operation. It is notably true of the subsidies to student, labor, and cultural groups that have recently been publicized that the Agency's objective was never to control their activities, only occasionally to point them in a particular direction, but primarily to enlarge them and render them more effective.

Turning to relations with other agencies, Mr. Bissell was impressed by the degree of improvement in relations with the State Department. Seen from the Washington end, there has been an increase in consultation at the country-desk level, more often at the Bureau level or the Assistant Secretary of State level as the operation shapes up. The main problem some five to six years ago was not one of responsibility or authority but of cover arrangements.

Mr. Bissell provided a brief critique of covert operations, along the following lines:

That aspect of the Agency's operations most in need of change is the Agency's use and abuse of "cover." In this regard, the "background paper" for this session raised many cover-oriented questions.

On disclosure of private institutional support of late, it is very clear that we should have had greater compartmenting of operations.

If the Agency is to be effective, it will have to make use of private institutions on an expanding scale, though those relations which have "blown" cannot be resurrected.

We need to operate under deeper cover, with increased attention to the use of "cut-outs." CIA's interface with the rest of the world needs to be better protected.

If various groups hadn't been aware of the source of their funding, the damage subsequent to disclosure might have been far less than occurred.

The CIA interface with various private groups, including business and student groups, must be remedied.

The problem of Agency operations overseas is frequently a problem for the State Department. It tends to be true that local allies find themselves dealing always with an American and an official American-since the cover is almost invariably as a U.S. government employee. There are powerful reasons for this practice, and it will always be desirable to have some CIA personnel housed in the Embassy compound, if only for local "command post" and communications requirements.

Nonetheless, it is possible and desirable, although difficult and time-consuming, to build overseas an apparatus of unofficial cover. This would require the use or creation of private organizations, many of the personnel of which would be non-U.S. nationals, with freer entry into the local society and less implication for the official U.S. posture.

The United States should make increasing use of non-nationals, who, with effort at indoctrination and training, should be encouraged to develop a second loyalty, more or less comparable to that of the American staff. As we shift our attention to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the conduct of U.S. nationals is likely to be increasingly circumscribed. The primary change recommended would be to build up a system of unofficial cover; to see how far we can go with non-U.S. nationals, especially in the field. The CIA might be able to make increasing use of non-nationals as "career agents" that is with a status midway between that of the classical agent used in a single compartmented operation perhaps for a limited period of time and that of a staff member involved through his career in many operations and well informed of the Agency's capabilities. Such career agents should be encouraged with an effort at indoctrination and training and with a prospect of long-term employment to develop a second loyalty and they could of course never be employed in ways that would conflict with their primary loyalties toward their own countries. This still leaves open, however, a wide range of potential uses. The desirability of more effective use of foreign nationals increases as we shift our attention to Latin America, Asia, and Africa where the conduct of United States nationals is easily subject to scrutiny and is likely to be increasingly circumscribed.

These suggestions about unofficial cover and career agents illustrate and emphasize the need for continuing efforts to develop covert action capabilities even where there is no immediate need to employ them. The central task is that of identifying potential indigenous allies-both individuals and organizations-making contact with them, and establishing the fact of a community of interest.

There is some room for improvement, Mr. Bissell thought, in the planning of covert action country by country. Covert intervention is probably most effective in situations where a comprehensive effort is undertaken with a number of separate operations designed to support and complement one another and to have a cumulatively significant effect. The Agency probably finds itself involved in too many small covert action operations having no particular relationship with one another and having little cumulative impact.

There is no doubt that some covertly funded programs could be undertaken overtly, Mr. Bissell thought. Often activities have been initiated through CIA channels because they could be started more quickly and informally but do not inherently need to be secret. An example might be certain exchange of persons programs designed to identify potential political leaders and give them some exposure to the United States. It should be noted, however, that many such innocent programs are more effective if carried out by private auspices than if supported officially by the United States government. They do not need to be covert but if legitimate private entities such as the foundations do not initiate them, there may be no way to get them done except by covert support to "front" organizations.

Many propaganda operations are of declining effectiveness. Some can be continued at slight cost, but some of the larger ones (radio, etc.) are pretty well "blown" and not inexpensive. USIA doesn't like them, and although they did have a real justification some ten to fifteen years ago as the voice of refugees and emigres, groups which also have declined in value, and in the view of some professionals are likely to continue declining in value.

In his last two years in the Agency, Mr. Bissell felt that the Clandestine Services could have been smaller.

Indeed, steps were taken to reduce their size. It is impossible to separate the issue of size from personnel and cover problems. It was Mr. Bissell's impression that the Clandestine Services were becoming increasingly a career service, too much like the Foreign Service (personnel looking to a succession of overt posts in a safe career). One result was the circumscription of local contacts. There was a subtle change taking place, which threatened to degrade some of CIA's former capabilities. Formally, the CIA had a staff with a wide variety of backgrounds, experiences, and capabilities. Its members were recruited from every sort of public and private occupation. If this diversity and variety is lost through the process of recruiting staff members from college, training them in a fairly standard pattern, and carrying them through orderly planned careers in the Agency, one of the organization's most valuable attributes will disappear.

Finally, Mr. Bissell remarked on large operations. It is self-evident that if an operation is too large, it can't remain a deeply kept secret. At best, one can then hope for a successful formal disclaimer. The worst of many faults of the Bay of Pigs operation was excessive reliance on the operation's disclaimability.

It has been a wise decision that operations of that scale not be undertaken by the Agency, except in theaters such as Vietnam, where the stakes and standards are different.

Covert action operations are generally aimed at short-term goals and the justification for the control machinery is that bias of operators to the short run can be compensated for in the review process. Mr. Bissell can conceive of no other way to force greater attention to long-range costs and values. One alternative is that caution will lead to ineffectuality. "Operational types" will be risk-takers; the counterweight is, and should be, applied by the other agencies in government.

In the discussion following Mr. Bissell's talk, the issue of CIA cover was cited as among the more interesting from the perspective of a former State Department appointee. The size of covert operations known to other governments was a continuing embarrassment, and the overseas staff maintained for these purposes and known to host governments was a similar source of embarrassment. From time to time, efforts were made to reduce overseas staff; although agreement in principle was readily forthcoming, the particulars of staff reduction were difficult to obtain.

A former member of the Special Group (who served eighteen months on that committee) agreed with Mr. Bissell's earlier remarks on control mechanisms, insofar as they applied to review of new projects. These received most careful scrutiny. Insofar as the Special Group considered ongoing projects during this eighteen-month period, it was recalled that there was not any systematic, thorough procedure for such review, the committee finding itself busy with all the new proposals. If it were true that most operations were most useful for short-term goals, then perhaps there should be greater attention to review of ongoing projects, and termination of more projects earlier than in past practice.

A continuing problem which worries one former official was that concerning the "charter" of CIA, the public expression of which, in the National Security Act of 1947, was necessarily vague. CIA's full "charter" has been frequently revised, but it has been, and must remain[,] secret. The absence of a public charter leads people to search for the charter and to question the Agency's authority to undertake various activities. The problem of a secret "charter" remains as a curse, but the need for secrecy would appear to preclude a solution.

Another former official remarked on the inadequacy of clandestine intelligence as a means of obtaining enemy intentions. Sherman Kent (former Chairman, Board of National Estimates) distinguishes "the knowable" from "the unknowable," and we should recognize that much remains impossible to know, including, frequently, enemy intentions.

Respecting the reduction of overseas personnel and programs of declining utility, it was noted that the curtailment of over-age and unproductive personnel was a thorny issue. Recognizing the likelihood of appeal to the President and the absence of widespread participation in a manpower review, a former budget official arranged the participation of the Bureau of the Budget, CIA, FIAB, and relevant Under Secretaries in considerations of budgetary modifications. What emerged was an inertia, partly the inertia of the cold war. Parenthetically, a couple of much-criticized public media projects (cited by name) had proven of value, as the fall of Novotny in Czechoslovakia suggested, but a number of ineffective programs were retained. The problem was to free the budget, to do something new, in the place of old programs, not to reduce the budget, but unfortunately, the chiefs in CIA wanted to control their working capital. If it were only possible to tell these officials not to worry, that we were setting aside $xxx million for CIA, and merely seeking to encourage better use of the same dollar amounts, then it would have been possible to move around some money. The big "iffy" question was a particular (named) foundation, which received a sizable allocation. Finally, everything was cleared up, and the next big review was scheduled, but never really effected as a consequence of the Cuban missile crisis. The review was geared up in 1963 once again.

Another observer, drawing upon work with the "combined cryptologic budget" and private industry, concluded that it was usually impossible to cut a budget; usually it was only possible to substitute a new project for an old one.

The Chairman suggested a number of questions: What are the effects of covert operations being blown? What can be done to improve the image of the Agency? What can be done to improve relations between the Agency and the press?

It was thought that a journalist's perspective might aid in discussing these questions, but a number of prior issues were thought to require attention:

(1) The matter of size required attention. In any government agency size can become a problem; increasingly there is a realization that the government is too big and "an ever-swelling tumor." At some point there will have to be a fairly sharp cutback in the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

(2) One was not overly impressed by the use of CIA in the developing world; in any case, we could have increased confidence in the range of choice in most developing areas. Conversely, it might not be as easy as Mr. Bissell suggested to know the power structure in more developed areas, in Western Europe and Japan.

(A query was interjected: Why should we have increasing confidence in the range of choice in developing areas?

Perhaps there are less variations than we earlier thought. "Things are evening out and we can live more comfortably.")

(3) Where do you bury the body? One is not completely convinced by citation of the experience with Frank Wisner's OPC. We could get around the responsibility issue raised by "Beedle" Smith; we could get around conflicting chains of command.

(4) Related to (3). Maybe there is a cost to be paid for having covert operations under CIA. Perhaps we could have intelligence collection under State and covert operations under the Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

In response to items (3) and (4) some earlier remarks were clarified: one would not claim that the operational side of CIA need be where it is. Rather, one would inveigh against the splitting of covert intelligence collection and covert operations. One could, however, split the operational side from the analytic side. This is a plausible case, a solution for which could be worked out (though, on balance, the speaker was against it). But to split the operational side-as the German case, the British case for a time, and our own for a time suggested- would be disastrous.

Remarking on labor activities, one participant stated that before May 1967 it was common knowledge that there had been some CIA support for labor programs, but first Ramparts and then Tom Braden spelled out this support in public. Those in international labor affairs were dismayed, and certain newspapermen compounded their difficulties by confusing AID with CIA, and claiming that the AFL-CIO's Free Labor Development program was tainted.

Since these disclosures, the turn of events has been unexpected. First, there hasn't been any real trouble with international labor programs. Indeed, there has been an increase in demand for U.S. labor programs and the strain on our capacity has been embarrassing. Formerly, these foreign labor unions knew we were short of funds, but now they all assume we have secret CIA money, and they ask for more help.

Worse yet, Vic Reuther, who had been alleging that others were receiving CIA money, and whose brother's receipt of $50,000 from CIA in old bills was subsequently disclosed by Tom Braden, still goes on with his charges that the AFL-CIO has taken CIA money. Here again, no one seems to listen, "The net result has been as close to zero as possible. We've come to accept CIA, like sin," So, for example, British Guiana's labor unions were supported through CIA conduits, but now they ask for more assistance than before. So, our expectations to the contrary, there has been almost no damage.

A former State Department official offered some remarks on intelligence operations as seen from the field. He concurred in Mr. Bissell's remarks on "cover." The initial agreement between the Agency and State was intended to be "temporary," but "nothing endures like the ephemeral."

How are Agency officials under "official cover" specially equipped to handle covert operations? If the Agency station chief has a "special relationship" with the chief of state, one would submit that it was because the Ambassador wasn't worth a damn. Moreover, such a "special relationship" created the risk that the chief of state, seeing two channels to Washington, could play one off against another. Some foreign statesmen are convinced that an "invisible government" really exists, and this impression shouldn't be allowed.

Also, prejudice in favor of covertly obtained intelligence is a troublesome thing.

One way to overcome the misconceptions is to make CIA a truly secret service, and not merely an agency duplicating the Foreign Service. With money shortages CIA has often filled a vacuum, but this does not make it right.

Another questioned the discussion leader's proposal for greater utilization of non-U.S. nationals. How could you get non-nationals to do the job and to develop loyalty to the United States?

One was not sure that it was doable, but it was worth trying. It would be more prone to work if you used a national of Country B to work in Country C, if what you are asking is neither (1) against the interest of Country B, nor (2) nefarious. You do need some cover, and the natural vehicle is an organization with non-American nationals.

Another observer was struck by the lack of interest in the "blowing" of covertly sponsored radio activities. Why has there been so little interest in these activities, in contrast to the immense concern over the CIA-NSA relationship? One might conclude that the public is not likely to be concerned by the penetration of overseas institutions, at least not nearly so much as by penetration of U.S. institutions. "The public doesn't think it's right; they don't know where it ends; they take a look at their neighbors." Does this suggested expansion in use of private institutions include those in the United States, or U.S. institutions operating overseas?

In response, attention was drawn to the clear jurisdictional boundaries between CIA and the FBI, CIA being proscribed from "internal security functions." CIA was averse to surveillance of U.S. citizens overseas (even when specifically requested), and averse to operating in the United States, excepting against foreigners here as transients. One might want CIA to expand its use of U.S. private corporations, but for objectives outside the United States. It was recalled that the Agency funding of the National Student Association was, in every case, for activities outside the United States or for activities with overseas objectives.

Why, we might ask, should the U.S. government use nongovernmental institutions more, and why should it deal with them in the United States? If dealings are overseas, then it is necessary to maintain an overseas bureaucracy to deal with the locals. It is also necessary to engage in communications in a possibly hostile environment. If one deals through U.S. corporations with overseas activities, one can keep most of the bureaucratic staff at home and can deal through the corporate headquarters, perhaps using corporate channels for overseas communications (including classified communications). In this opinion, the policy distinction should involve the use to which the private institution is put, not whether or not to use private institutions.

In another view it was desirable for this discussion group to examine different types of institutions. For example, should CIA use educational institutions? Should CIA have influenced the selection of NSA officers?

One was not aware that CIA had influenced the election of NSA officers; if it had, it shouldn't have done so, in one's opinion.

Mightn't it be possible to deal with individuals rather than organizations?

Yes, in many cases this would be preferable. It depended upon skill in the use of our operating capabilities.

As an example of the political use of secretly acquired intelligence, a former official noted the clandestine acquisition of Khrushchev's "secret speech" in February 1956. The speech was too long for even Khrushchev to memorize, and over one hundred people had heard it. We targeted it, and by secret means acquired a copy. The State Department released the text and The New York Times printed it in full. The repercussions were felt around the world, and particularly within the Communist bloc. The Soviets felt unable to deny the authenticity of the text we released, and the effect upon many of the satellite states was profound. It was the beginning of the split in the Communist movement. If you get a precise target, and go after it, you can change history.

Another observer was troubled by the earlier-expressed point about increased use of private institutions. Most demoralizing in the academic community was the sense of uncertainty about institutions with which individuals were associated. There is a profound problem in penetrating institutions within the country when there is a generalized loss of faith, a fear that nothing is what it seems.

It was noted that the next session, on February 15, 1968, would concentrate upon relations with private institutions.

To one observer, part of this solution would be found in the political process, involving extragovernmental contacts in the sphere of political action.

In response to a query, the relative utilities of types of intelligence data were reviewed. Most valuable was reconnaissance, then communications- electronic intelligence, then classical espionage.

We have forgotten, it was noted, the number one over-all source, namely, overt data.

The meeting was adjourned at 9: 15 p.m., and participants were reminded of the next meeting on February 15.